She would not look at him.

"Nobody," she said, "can be--always."

"You wouldn't know it. You wouldn't see me--when you were immersed."

"I'm afraid," she said, "I always am, I always shall be--immersed."

"Won't there be moments?"

"Oh, moments! Very few."

"I wouldn't care how few there were," he said. "I know there can't be
many."

She understood him. There was nothing on earth like Nicky's delicacy. He
was telling her that he would accept any terms, the very lowest; that he
knew how Tanqueray had impoverished her; that he could live on moments,
the moments Tanqueray had left.

"There are none, Nicky. None," she said.

"I see this isn't one of them."

"All the moments--when there are any--will be more or less like this.
I'm sorry," she said.

"So am I," said he. It was as if they were saying they were sorry he
could not dine.

So monstrous was Nicky's capacity for illusion that he went away
thinking he had given Jane up for the sake of her career.

And Jane tried to think of Nicky and be sorry for him. But she couldn't.
She was immoderately happy. She had given up Brodrick's magazine and
Brodrick's money for Tanqueray's sake. Tanks would have his chance. He
would be able to take a house, and then that little wife of his wouldn't
have to sit with her hands before her, fretting her heart away because
of Tanks. She was pleased, too, because she had made Brodrick do what he
hadn't meant and didn't want to do.

But as she lay in bed that night, not thinking of Brodrick, she saw
suddenly Brodrick's eyes fixed on her with a look in them which she had
not regarded at the time; and she heard him saying, in that queer, quiet
voice of his, "I'm almost glad to have lost you this way."

"I wonder," she said to herself, "if he really spotted me."

XIX

Brodrick's house, Moor Grange, stood on the Roehampton side of Putney
Heath, just discernible between the silver and green of the birches.
With its queer, red-tiled roofs, pitched at every possible slope, white,
rough-cast, many-cornered walls, green storm-shutters, lattice windows
of many sorts and sizes, Brodrick's house had all the brilliant
eccentricity of the twentieth century.

But Brodrick's garden was at least a hundred years older than his house.
It had a beautiful green lawn with a lime-tree in the middle and a
stone-flagged terrace at the back overlooking the north end of the
Heath. Behind the house there was a kitchen garden that had surviv